Phoenix, Pascal Star in A24's 'Eddington,' a Modern Western Mirroring Texas Realities

The landscape remembers. And in the parched, sun-baked sprawl of Central Texas, as in the New Mexico that birthed Ari Aster, there’s a particular kind of forgetting that takes root, an amnesia born of heat and dust and the hum of progress.

Ari Aster, a filmmaker whose oeuvre tends to dismember the comfortable illusion of reality, has once again presented us with a mirror, albeit a darkly fractured one, in his latest offering, "Eddington." It's a film that, like a mirage on a summer highway, flickers with familiar anxieties, making it a disquieting conversation for anyone who calls the American Southwest home.

Aster has traded the pagan rituals of "Midsommar" and the Freudian nightmares of "Hereditary" for a more insidious horror in "Eddington" — the American fracture of 2020. The setting is a fictional New Mexico town, but the tremors it depicts are, unsettlingly, our own. It's a modern Western and a paranoid thriller, a story of a nation under pressure, sifting reality through the haze of social media, and ultimately, losing its collective mind.

"Eddington" is now playing in theaters. Showtimes in Austin can be found online.

It begins with COVID-19, not as a distant headline, but a suffocating presence. Mask mandates, social distancing, the subtle yet profound shift in the way we navigate shared spaces.

Sheriff Joe Cross, played by a Joaquin Phoenix whose every twitch conveys profound weariness, embodies a certain strain of American defiance. He is the local strongman, protecting his flock from the perceived tyranny of protocols, a champion of individual liberty against the faceless mandate. We in Texas recognize this archetype. It’s etched into our very bedrock: a fierce individualism.

Aster speaks of the specific class and racial resentments that simmer beneath the surface in a state with small red towns, a land of stark aesthetic beauty and equally stark political divides. This duality, this push and pull between urban liberalism and rural conservatism, is not unique to New Mexico; it is the very pulse of Texas outside our gleaming metropolises. The film captures the visceral anger, the fraught relationships with authority, the deeply personal interpretations of a global crisis that defined those years.

A central conflict emerges between Sheriff Joe, a conservative, and the progressive incumbent Mayor Ted Garcia, portrayed by Pedro Pascal. Mayor Ted aims to modernize their dusty hamlet by attracting a new artificial-intelligence data center. This showdown, in a town with just over 2,000 residents, quickly derails a citizenry pushed to the brink by spiraling conspiracies and standoffs.

For an Austin audience, this data center conflict resonates with a chilling familiarity. The whispers of battles against data centers in Hays County and Elon Musk’s ambitious projects in small Central Texas towns echo through "Eddington's" narrative.

Aster positions this data center as a "deliberately peripheral" element that is, in fact, "central to the movie." It is, he suggests, the true crisis incubating in the background — a metaphor for the unseen forces that reshape our lives while we are distracted by the immediate, often manufactured, emergencies.

Beyond the infrastructure and the mandates, "Eddington" delves into the psychological landscape of a nation unraveling. The George Floyd protests, a series of seismic events that shook the foundations of American society, are not confined to distant Minneapolis. They ripple through Eddington, prompting Sheriff Cross to question his lone Black deputy on the "why" of it all, a microcosm of the questioning that permeated white America at the time.

Social media activism, the black grid Instagram posts, the deluge of hyper-polarized news and conspiracy theories on Facebook – these are not distant memories but persistent specters, shaping our realities even now.

Emma Stone portrays Sheriff Joe’s wife, Louise, who finds solace and understanding in online conspiracy theories and the pronouncements of cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak, played by Austin Butler. This delves into the "QAnon space" that many fell into during pandemic lockdowns, highlighting how individuals, particularly those grappling with personal trauma, can be manipulated by demagogues promising answers.

Aster wanted to make a film about what it feels like "to live in an environment where nobody's really living in the same reality anymore." This sentiment, a lament for a lost common ground, resonates deeply in a state like Texas, where the chasm between opposing political narratives can feel unbridgeable. The film, in its visceral, often uncomfortable portrayal, asks us to confront the "desperate situation" in which our neighbors have become our enemies.

"Eddington" is not a comfortable film. It is visceral, violent, anxiety-inducing – all the hallmarks of an Ari Aster production. Yet, in its grotesque extremes, it illuminates a human experience, a shared anxiety that feels profoundly American. It is a cinematic mirror reflecting the arid landscapes, the clear skies, and the stark political divides that define our region.